SECOND THOUGHTS FOLLOWING HIS WIFE'S NEAR-FATAL ACCIDENT, VITALY SCHERBO STARTED PONDERING LIFE BEYOND THE GYM

Whenever it is time for Vitaly Scherbo to prepare for a majorgymnastics competition, he leaves the house he owns on atree-lined street in State College, Pa., and returns home toMinsk, the gray, decrepit industrial city that is the capital ofBelarus. He goes there to find his nerve: thatme-against-the-world impetus that four years ago drove him to arecord six gymnastics gold medals at the Barcelona Games. ForScherbo, there is nothing that steels him for competition likethe memories evoked by the forbidding streets of his birthplace.

On Glabky Prospect, where Vitaly lived when he was five, hisfather left him and his mother, Valentina, a schoolteacher, tofend for themselves. On Gerasimenko Prospect, where Vitaly livedin a small apartment with his new wife, Irina, in 1992, atrusted friend stole his post-Olympic earnings. On StorojevskayaProspect, along the Svislach River, where Irina walked theirdaughter, Kristina, in a stroller, passersby wondered aloud whatprice the baby's new clothes would fetch if they swiped them."Conditions are a joke there," he says in good English. "Petrolis gone. Heat is off. Everywhere happens crime. And the food soscarce."

Nevertheless, Scherbo returned to that place to prepare himselffor the Atlanta Games. And after the near tragedy that struckhis family in State College last winter, leaving him inemotional tatters, he was counting more than ever on the grimreminders in Minsk to stoke his competitive fires.

On Dec. 13, when Irina left the house to go to a hair salon,temperatures hovered around 30[degrees] and a light drizzleformed patches of ice on the roads in State College. She recallsnothing of the moment when her BMW sedan slid sideways into atelephone pole. Later that day police showed photos of thewreckage to Ed Isabelle, a local gymnastics coach who had takenthe Scherbos in when they first came to the U.S., in February1993. "The car's front and back had bent around the pole andreconnected to each other," Isabelle recalls. "The first thing Isaid was, 'My god, she's dead, isn't she?' Nobody could havesurvived that."

Irina was airlifted to Geisinger Medical Center, 80 miles awayin Danville, where Dr. Matthew Indeck recalls finding her "insevere hemorrhagic shock with not much chance of survival."

Indeck removed Irina's ruptured spleen and began repairing alacerated liver and fractures of the ribs and pelvis. It wasfour days before the bleeding completely stopped.

Scherbo stood watch over his wife's listless body, dozingagainst the bed rail. Periodically he left her to visit a nearbybar, where he drank vodka and sank into a stupor. VitalyScherbo, whose command of the gymnastics apparatuses wasremarkable, had no control over what was going on in thathospital room. His grief was unremitting. "You could see it whenhe opened her purse," Isabelle says. "He took out her scarf,gazed into it, smelled it, brushed it against the side of hisface. Every object had a memory for him."

It took the arrival of Scherbo's best friend, AlexanderKolyvanov, a former Soviet teammate and now an assistant coachat the University of Iowa, to revive him. "When I saw him thefirst time, I didn't recognize his face," Kolyvanov says. "Helooked old, like he was trying to [convalesce] with her. I toldhim right in his face, 'You have to live. She needs to have astrong man, not like drunk, not weak crying baby.'"

Kolyvanov kept Scherbo dry, dragged him to a gym for modestworkouts and persuaded him to stay active in the hospital.Scherbo heeded his friend's prodding. He learned to read theoxygenation tank and memorized the function of every tuberunning into and out of Irina's body. He dressed the walls withpictures of himself and Kristina so Irina could wake to theirsmiles if he wasn't there. He played her favorite music, andthen he rewound the tape and played it again.

Four weeks after the accident, Irina squeezed Vitaly's hand forthe first time. She didn't believe a month had passed until shesaw how much Kristina had changed. And Vitaly had changed too."I remember his face," Irina says. "I saw that he was in loveonly with me, and that was the totality of his emotion. I tellyou, that pulled me back to life. Maybe in the past his mind wasin the gym. Now when he goes away, he calls twice a day: 'Irina,you must eat.'"

"O.K., so I became nicer," Vitaly, 24, admits, "but that hadalready started. When I got married and I lived in the States,it made me to think as an adult, not always angry."

A hint of his metamorphosis surfaced during a press conferenceat the 1995 world championships in Sabae, Japan, when a reporterasked about Scherbo's fluctuating waistline as the gymnastlicked beer suds from his lips. "How do you like that beer, andhow much weight have you gained?"

"My beer is fine," he answered. "Would you like some?"

Scherbo first vaulted into the international gymnasticsspotlight as an 18-year-old in 1990, when he won three goldmedals at the European championships in Lausanne, Switzerland,and then won the all-around title at the Goodwill Games inSeattle. He was a highly skilled gymnast, but he had a petulantedge to his personality that wore thin on his teammates.Kolyvanov recalls the day Scherbo was trying some new moves onthe pommel horse at a national training camp. Valentin Mogilny,a former world champion on the horse and five years Scherbo'ssenior, was observing, and when he tried to replicate Scherbo'sroutine he slipped off the apparatus. Scherbo prodded Mogilnywith trash talk, and the two had their first of several run-insthat year.

Former Soviet coach Leonid Arkaev would roll his eyes as histeam marched silently, single file, attired in CCCP warmups,into practice halls with Scherbo bringing up the rear--boom boxblaring, shoulders bobbing, tattered Mickey Mouse shirt onbackward. "Vitaly has a very high appreciation for Vitaly,"Arkaev explained. "He likes to admire himself from differentangles."

When it came to enforcing curfew after three-a-day trainingsessions on the Black Sea, Arkaev had trouble with more teammembers than just Scherbo. "We had a work-hard, play-hard rule,"Kolyvanov says. "They told us, 'In bed by 11.' Then as soon asthe coach called, 'Lights off,' we would explore the world, tofind girlfriends or something."

Such was Vitaly's lifestyle until he met Irina, a sportsacrobat, at the Moscow Sports Center. Three weeks later hepromised Kolyvanov that he would marry her. "His confidence justkilled me," Irina recalls. "This is so great in a man. He didn'tshow off, but he was so honest and straight. He would not hidefrom any situation. He didn't let me go. He would take my handand I couldn't do anything. It was like animal or something."

The couple wed in December 1991, three months after Scherbo wonan all-around silver at his first world championships. "I was somad at that," he says. "I knew I was the best, but my landingswere not good. I told myself, O.K, you stick every dismount inBarcelona." He promised his mother three Olympic gold medals,but he did better than that, returning home with team,all-around and four apparatus titles.

However, when the Soviet Union broke up into independentrepublics in 1991, the national sports system that hadguaranteed Soviet stars a cushy, protected life also fell apart.Based on the roughly $18,000 that Soviet athletes were paid foreach gold medal won at the 1988 Seoul Games, Scherbo expected toreceive in excess of $100,000. Instead, he didn't get half thatamount, and what's more, Belarussian sports officials wanted himto funnel his earnings from exhibition tours through theirOlympic committee, which would keep 30%. "I told them, 'I didmore for your country than all of your fabrics, all of yourexports,'" Scherbo says. "Before me, the world asks, What is it,Belarus? And for this they give me special tax?"

Scherbo kept his post-Olympic savings ($21,000 U.S. and 8,000Swiss francs) in his flat on Gerasimenko Prospect. But once,when his childhood teammate Nikolai Tikhonovich came over toborrow money, Scherbo mistakenly allowed Tikhonovich to seewhere it was hidden. The next day, Scherbo learned later,Tikhonovich and two other men broke into the empty apartment andstole the cash. Six months later the thieves were arrested, butthe money was never recovered.

During one of his post-Olympic tours, Scherbo told a U.S.national team assistant coach, Soviet emigre Yefim Furman, thatIrina was pregnant and he wanted the baby to be born in theStates so it would have U.S. citizenship. Furman often trainedat a gymnastics academy Isabelle owned in Woodward, Pa., 25miles outside State College, and he asked Isabelle to takeVitaly and Irina in. After an eight-month stay with Isabelle,during which Vitaly remained in the U.S. on a work visa, theScherbos returned to Belarus in September 1993 with theirsix-month-old baby.

Despite having two cars stolen, they planned to remain inMinsk--until the day two summers ago when Irina overheard themen talking of stealing Kristina's clothes. Soon after, theScherbos bought their place in State College, where they spendup to 10 months of the year. When he is not competing around theworld Vitaly trains at the Woodward Academy and occasionallyworks with the aspiring gymnasts.

Even though a chronically sore left shoulder twice caused him tomiss a week of training this year, Scherbo won three medals,including a gold in the floor exercises, at the worldchampionships in April, and the following month he won threegolds in the European championships. Before each of thosecompetitions he returned to Minsk, and in May he went back againto gird himself for the Olympics. After a brief vacation inItaly, he came straight to Atlanta in late June to begin hisfinal tune-up.

Competing for the first time in the Olympics as an independentnation, Belarus, led by Scherbo's 115.210 individual points,finished fourth in the men's team competition on Monday, thenScherbo won the bronze in the individual all-around onWednesday. He blamed the judges for his failure to repeat asgold medalist, saying Li Xiaoshuang of China, the winner, hadreceived more favorable scoring than he did. The men's sixindividual apparatus golds will be contested tonight andtomorrow night at the Georgia Dome.

Scherbo had hoped to repeat his Barcelona success in Atlanta,seeing these Games as his opportunity to shift into a leadershiprole in gymnastics worldwide. He will be easing out ofcompetition. After he performs with other world champions on a60-city post-Olympic tour, he wants to open his own gym inPennsylvania and work to popularize the sport--perhaps even helprun it someday. "If I win more medals," he said last month, "Ican make my future. I can introduce gymnastics so kids will loveit. Then I take out maybe half of judges, the dishonest ones. Ido everything gymnasts and coaches want me to do. Then we have agood time, because I change everything."

And there will no longer be a need for the treks to Minsk.

COLOR PHOTO: GREG FOSTER With only a bronze in the all-around, it's time for Scherbo to get back on his horse. [Vitaly Scherbo]COLOR PHOTO: AL TIELEMANS/DUOMO In Barcelona, Scherbo flew through the air with the greatest of ease--and won six gold medals. [Vitaly Scherbo]COLOR PHOTO: AL TIELEMANS Irina, with Kristina in June, barely survived the accident in State College last December. [Kristina Scherbo and Irina Scherbo]COLOR PHOTO: PENNSYLVANIA STATE POLICE [See caption above--car wreck]